Synopsis

It's autumn in Grand River, and that means getting ready for Halloween. As Keisha and her pals prepare for the school's annual Halloween parade, the Carters are getting ready for trick-or-treaters. Unfortunately, though, the phone rings one morning and a young deer has a plastic pumpkin stuck on his head. He was enjoying the birdseed treat inside when his antlers got caught. What's a deer to do? And how do you get a plastic pumpkin off a deer's head when you can't catch it? The Carters' have another problem to solve in this third installment of Animal Rescue Team!

Also available:Animal Rescue Team #1: Gator on the Loose!Animal Rescue Team #2: Special Delivery!

Excerpt

Keisha Carter set out five pieces of bread and buttered them. Using a biscuit cutter, she made a hole in the center of each piece and settled them butter-side-down into Daddy's hot pan.

"Please get Grandma the ice pack from the freezer," Daddy said as he cracked eggs into the empty spaces.

Keisha stood on her tippy-toes and felt for the ice pack. "Did she have yoga last night?"

"Yes. According to Bob, she was showing their instructor the new move she's made up. Cat-falling-off-counter or something like that. She strained her back a little."

Big Bob, as all the kids called him, worked as a vet tech at the Humane Society, was the leader of their 4-H's Wild 4-Ever Club and always put his yoga mat next to Grandma's at Yoga You Can Do. But he was not Grandma's boyfriend. "Take it right up and ask her if she wants breakfast in bed. And please find Razi for me. You don't want to be late for school. Tell him I'm making toad-in-the-hole. That'll get him going."

As Keisha hurried down the hall, she heard the phone ringing in the office. Grandma usually answered the phone on school mornings, but she was upstairs groaning.

"I'll get it," Keisha called back to Daddy in the kitchen, so he didn't have to leave the eggs. "Carters' Urban Rescue," she answered, a little out of breath.

"Oh dear. Oh, the poor little deer."

"Excuse me?" Keisha asked.

"I have a deer here that needs rescuing."

"Do you live in the city?" Though the Carters had rescued a lot of animals since they set up their business, it wasn't often they got a call about a deer.

"I should think so. I'm right on the edge of Huff Park."

Huff Park was less than a mile from the Carters' home.

"Is the deer injured?" Keisha sat down at the desk and opened the "animal info" file drawer. She yanked out the file labeled "deer."

Keisha felt her stomach grumbling. "If the deer isn't injured, why does it need to be rescued?" she asked, hoping to hurry the call to an end for the lady who was about to miss her bus and for her empty stomach.

"Because he can't get the pumpkin off his head!"

Keisha was so surprised, she didn't know what to say.

"Hello? Did you hear me? If I miss the 7:42, I'll be late for work. And I'm the one who makes the coffee. Dr. Trimble says it is the only civilized cup of coffee he gets in a day."

Keisha did not know the difference between civilized coffee and uncivilized coffee, but in the end they were supposed to be talking about a deer, weren't they?

"About the deer . . ."

"I live at 422 Joan Street. The street dead-ends into the park. In a few months, we'll have cross-country skiers trampling my perennial beds. I'm looking out my back door right now and he's . . . he's taking the trail that leads to the baseball diamonds. Oh, the poor deer. How will he eat? How will he drink? Please come out and get this pumpkin off his head."

"But how did he get--"

"Every Halloween time, I put it out for birds with the seeds right in it. He must have been after the salt on the seeds, poor thing, and it got stuck on his head. There's nothing I can do about it now, and being late for work and having Mary Nell make the coffee won't help the deer's plight. I just don't understand why it's stuck so fast. Isn't there something you can do?"

"A family business that rescues wildlife? What will we think of next? Well . . . please relay this information to your father and see if he can do something for that poor, unfortunate deer. I really must dash. Good day, young lady." Keisha heard the phone disconnect. She sat still for a minute, trying to figure out how a deer would get into the city in the first place. Then she remembered that Big Bob had once explained that deer could come into the city by traveling through "wildlife corridors," or stretches of nature that weren't proper forests. Wildlife corridors could be a city cemetery or urban garden, even a bunch of empty lots.

About Sue Stauffacher

So this is the story of the story of how the Animal Rescue Team series came about. In the summer of 2007, my editor at Knopf and Crown Books for Young Readers, Nancy Hinkel, asked me if I’d like to propose a series idea. Before this, I had written what we call “‘stand alone”’ novels. A series—as I’m sure you know—is multiple books involving the same characters. Well, gee, that was like asking me if I wanted a frozen Snickers bar. (I love frozen Snickers’ bars.).

Years ago, I had written a book called “The Kids’ Guide to Wildlife Rehabilitation.” Wildlife rehabilitators rescued injured and abandoned wildlife and make them better so they can return to the wild. Wildlife rehabilitators work with everything from garter snakes to elephants, from pigeons to porcupines. I love wildlife rehabilitators. There’s never a dull moment when you’re hanging around them.

What a great idea for a family business! So I invented the characters in Carter’s’ Urban Rescue: kids Keisha, Razi, and Paulo, along with Mama and Daddy and Grandma. Then I got to invent their friends: Aaliyah, Zeke and Zack, Wen, Jorge, Samantha, and Big Bob! They live in the city of Grand River, which is a lot like the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I live. Other people in the book, like such as the principal of the kids’ school, the mayor, and the director of the zoo, are even named after the real-life people in my world. (I asked their permission first.). Finally, I just started collecting ideas from the newspaper. If you read the newspaper for about, say, four days in a row, you’ll understand the saying, “‘Ttruth is stranger than fiction.”’ Here’s the one a newspaper headline that got the ball rolling for Animal Rescue Team: “It’s no crock: Gator shows up in GR [Grand Rapids].”

It was interesting to read about an alligator on the south side of the city, but it seemed more interesting and, okay, a little more zany, if the alligator was found in the city pool. That’s how I do it. I take something that has happened, or maybe mush together a bunch of things that have happened, and then I add the magic ingredient—imagination—and I make up a story. Every Animal Rescue Team book has a section at the back where I explain to kids how I got the idea and then how I dressed it up. This is so kids will know what to do with all the ideas they get every day. It helps to write a few things down or take a few pictures with your cell phone, if that’s your gig. But in general, I don’t make up stories, I find them, like plastic cups on the sidewalk; and then I take them home and see what I can make of them.

My dog Sophie and my cat Fig, my boys’ experiences, my husbands’ rescue attempts, and my big old garden behind my big old farmhouse, are all great places to find stories. If I take Sophie for a walk in the woods, she likes to sniff out her own stories. (I can usually smell these later.). To help kids get an even more in-depth look at how I create, I add lots of details on my blog “Imaginerience.” You can get to my blog and see pictures of my garden and a video trailer of the book at my Web site www.suestauffacher.com. If you’re on Facebook, you can choose to “like” my Animal Rescue Team page and keep up with all the latest stuff I’m doing and even more animal rescue tips. I get very excited when kids tell me their own tips and also how the Animal Rescue Team taught them something that ended up benefitting wildlife.

The very best part of writing books is working with a whole team of super-creative people who make “‘plastic cups”’ look like crystal glasses. Our designer for the series, Sara Hokanson, and illustrator Priscilla Lamont make reading Animal Rescue Team as delicious as eating a frozen Snickers bar. And editors Nancy Hinkel and Allison Wortche worked with me to make the characters and the plot sparkle and shine. Together we’re the Animal Rescue Team Team! And we hope you have as much fun reading the books as we did creating them.